Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

What kind of sweetspot workouts did you do? Looking to do similar a couple of days a week. Hard to know as cyclist forums talk about even 60-90minutes being achievable in sweetspot zone and quickly progressing to these long reps- did you create/stick to workouts similar to the running ones here or something like 3x 12min @ 90%FTP?

1x45-80 minutes sweetspot is sustainable. Even at the beginning of season I can do 1x60 at FTP. It’s just more time to recover the less fit I am.

I think your success will vary depending on which dials you turn.

I’m a runner who relatively recently introduced large volumes of Zwift for triathlon training purposes - I’ve been going for about 3 months now, have done the full Zwift 20 minute plus FTP test 3 times, and feel fairly confident that I’m not wildly overestimating my FTP, which has gone from 170 on day 1 to 245 as of today.

I started off just doing the Zwift suggested Sweetspot workouts, but have created my own custom workouts over time to better suit what I’m looking for.

First off, the range people give for FTP has a huge impact - online you mostly see 88-94%. I could go at 88% for an hour or more no problem, but 94% gets psychologically taxing quickly. I could do an hour if someone was standing over me with a whip, but it’s tough to push that hard for a sustained period.

So, I like to set up my rep lengths and breaks to be reflective of where I’m sitting in that range, inspired lightly by this thread. I’ll do 8 minutes on, 1 mins rest at 94%, all the way up to 2x 30 at 88%, with 4 or 5 mins break.

I’ve found solid progress with just doing 3x sweetspot on the bike and 3x sub threshold on the run, and then either a long easy run or a long easy bike on the 7th day. I also do 2 or 3 pool sessions after the bike or run, but that’s sort of irrelevant. I think most here view that as far too much quality, but so far I’m not feeling worn down and the bike just isn’t hard hitting like running is.

assuming that at some point in the distant future, weekly and sub-t volume can no longer be sustainably increased on this schedule, where do you add load? when does the long run max out? when does volume in a single sub-t session max out? when does the duration of an easy run become too long?

i realize that fitness improvement will technically provide an increase in load, but there seems to be a point in diminishing returns upon which people running this method increase training load in the aforementioned ways.

looking at sirpoc and the many others on this method, it's clear that that point is really far in the future, and that you can sustainably maintain and occasionally inch load up to keep within a reasonable volume for months and likely years.

i'm just curious what the method looks like in the theoretical and distant future.

Well, there’s a runner or two from Norway who run double workouts several times per week…

I built up towards doing 40 minutes worth of SS in each workout. The shortest reps were 7 minutes and the longest 15 minutes. I was riding them around 85% FTP. Stuff like 6 x 7 , 4 x 10, 3 x 15 mins. Rest was almost always 2 mins.

Thanks for this. Helpful. Interestingly since Tuesday , sirpoc has already done 4 non running workouts in this first patch where he is nursing some sort of injury. I'm guessing?

This matches up with something he said buried really deep in the thread a while ago, about the impact of the mechanical load was really the only limiter to something like marathon pace everyday.

Seems like he's doing a variation of that, without the risk of running. Also, I found a bit where he said a few times he took the winter off on the bike and in his cycling days and then overloaded on sweetspot to get back up to fitness, something you obviously can't do running as mentioned.

Hopefully a few things.

1. He's back running soon, assuming he wants to. I've always felt there is a good chance he will just vanish.

2. It might give us a nice idea of what you could/can try and achieve with being limited or capped in the running you can do when you.

3. How much fitness is lost, as if anything the intensity has been upped, rather than decreased, but obviously without the specificity of running.

Having seen how much power he is producing on the bike though, which looks only to be a little under what he must have been doing as a semi elite time trialists, hopefully he hasn't just completely given up with running.

Yeah he may just be on vacation somewhere he can’t easily run, though? I follow his Strava and I don’t think he’s responded to the many people asking “injury?” on each post?

But agreed on all your points. Due to summer heat I’ve yet to check where my running fitness is since I switched from 6/7 days a week running to the current routine of 3 days a week + biking and swimming, but I’m vacationing somewhere much cooler in the next week or two and I plan to time trial a 5K and see what’s happened. I am hopeful for actual improvement, but we shall see.

Interestingly, Parker Valby got a lot of crap and scepticism on other corners of letsrun for her heavy use of elliptical for most mileage, with only limited workouts on the track, but it actually aligns with sirpoc’s theories. If anything, use of the elliptical might be a further hack to avoid injury while allowing a greater proportion of high intensity work than Norwegian Singles Method currently prescribes.

Cross training can help you MAINTAIN fitness for a month or so. From my experience there is a statute of limitations on it. If your goal is to keep improving as a runner, running only 3x week won’t be enough.

Well, we’ll see - I’m doing this out of necessity due to a current interest in triathlon, but I’m not convinced that your blanket statement is true.

What evidence could I provide that would change your mind? Right before I switched to triathlon training, I ran a 2:56 marathon. I have a marathon scheduled for one month after my half-IM later this year. If I improve my Marathon PR based on 9 months of triathlon-focused training, would that be enough to show that heavy cross training can still lead to running improvements?

This is really splitting hairs, but i think i agree with you both.

3 days a week running is definitely more like maintenance.

4 i think you can still advance your fitness, but you really want 5 days running most weeks

You're definitely still trying to thread the needle here, dont get me wrong.

I tried to do a 3/3 split (running and cycling) and i dont think i was 'advancing' my running fitness. At least at this point, i dont really know a formula where a 50/50% type split will really get all of the benefits across from the cylcing (cross training) to your running. This of course doesn't account for doubling up on days in separate disciplines, but that's kind of a separate discussion..

It's always a very tight tipping point and what you choose to deploy for the cross training has to be kept in context of your overall goals, but IMO it is so superior in your post race/deload weeks to be able to have a tool where you are recovering in a sense but still maintaining that load through other means and if you are motivated and forcing it a little, it's not really too damaging to the overall picture for your running.

To me that post race week can be the trap. If it went well or went badly, you are gassed up and can really bury yourself in quite a hole. With planning in a cross training heavy week after a race your blunt that to a certain extent and allow yourself to reset into the schedule in a good place.

Question: In the past, I noticed that I respond well to "over/under" style sessions like:

12/16k alternating 1k ON@15k pace with 1k OFF@20-25'' slower. Or,

4-5 times 2k ON@21k pace with 1k OFF@15-20'' slower,

and so on. I find these sessions not very demanding on both the mental and physical side. What would be their place in NSA? I think having a session with active recovery would give a nice stimulus. What's the issue, would it be too hard to track intensity and fatigue compared to the typical "standing recovery" sessions?

Greek Strava guy wants tips for running an ultra. Just imagine for a second that it wasn't an online forum but an actual in-person run club, started explicitly by and for people trying to get fitter/faster over some common distances off a very specific method. They're older, or maybe burnt out, thought they had plateaued long ago, and now they're rejuvenated by the thought of finding themselves at the top end of their age category in local races. That's all. So, everyone is standing around happy with their newfound PB's, maybe analysing their 7 hour week and how much ST volume they can perform within it and still recover, when to push up their overall mileage and by how much, whether they'd be better off doing a 10x3min workout on Saturday vs 8x1K which adds up to roughly the same for them at their level or if there's much of a difference either way, should they do an easy hour twice a week and an easy 45min on the third easy day, or is it better to do three easy runs of 55mins to be consistent... And then this one guy shuffles over and starts blabbering. Does anyone think he could finish a 142km race in October without any 30km long runs? Should he be doubling with more running in the evening or would a cycling sweetspot session work better? You look at each other and someone brave enough to speak up tells him Idk man try it and see for yourself, but we're discussing something else here? We're doing what we're doing because we either can't handle that kind of mileage or just don't have the time for it, and doubles also don't work for us for whatever reason. Honestly, seems like you're only asking because you wanted us to be impressed that you're entering an ultra but all of us here are mostly focused on training as efficiently as we can in our limited time to maximise our potential in the 5K to the marathon, with a few of us also curious about the 800 to the 3K. And he gets a manic look in his crazed eyes and starts guffawing about how there's nothing to be impressed about because his PB's are so slow so why would he be bragging?? He HATES running 10K's, but he loves to run high mileage for his mental health and did he mention he also does a full bodyweight strength routine and crosstrains too? Not bragging, though, no, he just has questions! And then he starts tearfully puffing about his constant exhaustion and something incomprehensible about his central nervous system. When someone else tries to suggest that if he wants to actually get on board with this method - the method that I cannot help but re-emphasise everyone else present in the group is either already on board with or curious to learn more about - he may have to cut down his volume a tad, he starts crying about how this is his therapy bro and he can't cut a single metre, and hey, running a fasted 15 miler with 4×10 mins at the tail end is fine and good and do you know what, it does qualify as NSA, actually, goodbye. And then he jogs home up a 7km incline at 11 minute pace.

I think the issue for majority of people is that workouts like the ones you’ve posted above would not be sustainable for several months on end. For aerobically-underdeveloped and/or injury prone runners (i.e. candidates for this training regime), the float recovery in your sample workouts is probably too intense - even if not “very demanding” when compared to a traditional continuous tempo or VO2max intervals.

Chasing marginal gains in stimulus by adding workouts on a regular basis that have you above your LTHR are probably not worth the risk. Extra stimulus for most people doing this is coming from the Parkrun/time trial/race every several weeks or so.

How do you respond to the NSA method as prescribed?

How does running 16k on off impact your fatigue compared to running 3 subT sessions. Is the load similar?

Can you run this session every week for 6 months? Do you run it once a week? What other sessions do you run?

Currently I'm not doing workouts at all as I am returning to run after an inguinal hernia surgery (probably caused by aggressive gym work). I am somehow injury prone in general, and that's the main reason I'm considering switching to NSA. I used to do the ON/OFF workouts in typical 90km weeks with 3 quality sessions. I find them much less demanding compared to continuous tempo runs (50-60 minutes at HM pace) and 10k pace sessions. My coach liked "hard" 10k sessions in the winter, something like 5x2k or 3x3k at 10k pace with 2 or 3 minutes very slow jog in between. These and the continuous tempo runs were deadly for me.

I like the overall philosophy of NSA and the idea of keeping the workouts under control (not what I was used to do), but I'd like to have a bit more variety, hence my question. Variety is harder to control though, so I see the issue.

Another thing that I'd love to do is running some of the shorter intervals on gravel or hilly terrain. Is that something that some of you have considered?

Has sirpoc lost the plot? He's basically doubling almost everyday on the eplitical and bike. Virtually all looks sweetspot or between LT1 and LT2 and some even more so.

The monotonous nature of this approach is both a feature (repeatable and consistent workouts yield steady improvements) and a drawback (it’s boring). If you’re like me and live in a running-friendly area it’s not so bad. Just make sure each of the three sessions is a different distance (i.e. 8x1k, 5x1mi, 4x2k) and adjust according to terrain (my reps on crushed gravel loop are a couple seconds slower than those on the waterfront path). Change up the route of your easy runs for some variety as well.

Best of luck with your recovery.

This! The guy is a pain in the ass.